You’re sitting at home in Honolulu, or Hilo, or Lihue, Hawaii.

Your smart phone starts buzzing. You look at it. Then you see a message that declares “Ballistic missile inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

Have you ever feared such a thing might occur?

It took 38 minutes for Hawaii’s residents to react to what turned out to be a false alarm.

I don’t know about you, but I might decide to panic at that moment.

It turns out that “human error” caused these minutes of grave concern.

Details remain sketchy. Someone reported today on CNN that a shift change at Hawaii’s emergency response center resulted in someone “pushing the wrong button.” Huh? What the … ?

We live in terribly tense times. The United States and North Korea are engaging in a war of wills. Our nation’s president keeps using his Twitter account to needle North Korean dictator/fruit cake Kim Jong Un about the size the two men’s nuclear “button.”

Hawaii residents hear all this right along with the rest of the country. Then they get a text message on every smart phone in the state that says missiles are incoming?

Hawaii wasn’t hit by a missile. For that the rest of the nation is grateful. But, oh brother, some of our fellow countrymen and women in Hawaii have some serious questions to answer.

Starting with: How in the name of nuclear holocaust does this happen … and how are we going to prevent this type of “human error” from recurring?